Quote:
Originally Posted by zeek
It isn't surprising that the Bible seems strange when you consider how long ago it was written. The writers' worldviews were informed by the cultures of their times as ours are informed by modern culture.
Their world is like a foreign land to us.Their cosmologies are prescientific. Their society traditional and was thoroughly patriarchal.
The Hebrew Bible is the product of ancient Israel. The New Testament is the product of the early Christian movement. What the Bible says is the words of those communities which were very different than ours.
They could not have imagined the way we understand things. We try to imagine how they viewed things but I don't see how we can ever achieve more than a rough approximation of their ancient perspectives.
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Zeek,
That is well said.
What has impressed me about this in recent years is that God did not expect that people in their time and place to have scientific knowledge as we understand it today. If they thought the earth was flat then a reference to “four corners” was fine. Planets were known as wandering stars in a crystalline heaven cosmological point of view.
He spoke to them in terms they could understand.... as He still does today.
Drake